Punk rock pogo robots

In early July, London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts hosted three nights of punk rock chaos with a difference, some of the audience were artificially intelligent robots designed to pogo when they recognised punk music being played.

The project was led by artist Fiddian Warman who created the headlining band, Neurotic and the PVC’s for the event, while collaborating on the robot design with computational biologist Peter McOwan and neurologist Barry Gibb.

Actually, this is not the first time we’ve had to resist making a Bee Gees joke about Dr Gibb, as we covered some of the media (over)excitement about a bit in his book The Rough Guide to the Brain last year.

The website for the project is fantastic and has lots of details about the project including a bit about the design of the neural network built and trained to recognise punk rock.

BBC News has some great video of the gigs, and the band even has its own MySpace page with some of the tracks ready for listening (which are actually pretty good).

Link to Neurotic and the pogoing robots website.Link to BBC News story and video.Link to Neurotic band MySpace page.